It takes just over two hours by car to get from London to Ipswich. But ten minutes are enough by car with Nathalie – Belgian teacher, unshakable fan, half a million followers on Instagram – to understand that with Ed Sheeran you don't joke. He climbed on a train in Brussels the same morning, invited by the label. Why? For years he has been updating an Instagram page as if it were the official Bulletin of the Sheeranian Fandom. Photos, anecdotes, set lists, hugs, fraternal shots together during the tours around the world: it tells it while building the emotional archive, as if its profile was the diary of an entire generation of fans.
The reason for so much attachment has perhaps always been there, in plain sight: Sheeran has chosen the easiest way, that of music as a common space, as a bonfire on which everyone can warm up. Pop for those who are not ashamed to sing with their hand on the heart. And in Ipswich, a few kilometers of kilometers from the Framlingham where he grew up, that bonfire takes shape of a small pub renamed for a day The Old Phone, like the single just released.
His real name is actually Thomas Wolsey, he is in the center, and is more or less as much as the aunt's living room. The pop-up pub in the heart of Suffolk will remain for a week covered with Sheeran themed photos and gadgets, with references to the new album Play Expected for September and memorabilia of the Ipeswich Town (of which the singer, very fans, last summer purchased 1.4% of the shares) and also anticipates a series of three shows in Portman Road, the local stadium, in July. Inside there are about fifty people, outside a very long tail of people who remained to look at (and listen) all the time.
A SMS with a pint like Emoji was the special password to unlock the invitation and try the fate. Then the expectation of the fans, from Saturday, the inevitable leak via forum and fanpage, to create a tail of curious outside already from noon: as he had already done at the end of March in the Ipswich homonymous of Massachusetts, opening a temporary Irish pub, the curious operation this time came from the parts of the house.
The stage is minimal: a stool, a guitar, a guinness that becomes hot while people get a rim in front. And when Sheeran enters it does not seem one who wrote some of the most listened songs in the world, but one who invited friends to home to make him feel new pieces.
With him on the micropalco there is a folk band from Colchester, the Fishclaw: accordion, flute, violin, nothing more. He says he taught them the pieces in just over a week and it's all fascinatingly handcrafted. Galway Girl, Don't, Photograph, Shape of You Collecting and warm play. But the gravitational center of the performance is Old Phonesong that gives the title to the pub, to the day, perhaps to all this new chapter. He was born, says Sheeran, after he had to rekindle an old iPhone of 2015 because of the cause for violation of the copyright intended for him for Shape of You From Sami Chokri and Ross O'Donoghue. Inside there were messages from another life. A friend, the last exchanges with an ex with which he had quarreled (“I know that after all she was right,” he says among the laughter), a family member with whom he had not been talking for years, the late friend Jamal Edwards. From that moment, the smartphone has become an unknown object for him, uses only SMS and communicates through FaceTime by an iPad. Even the celebratory t-shirt, for the occasion, recites “An Seanfhón”, “old phone” in Irish, the language of the father.
Nostalgia, however, is not tearful here. It is full of irony, of kindness, of that practical melancholy that does not dig the hole, but plants on it a flower. In the middle, two other new pieces arrive, the unpublished Sapphire and the single released a month ago Azizam. Those will also be part of Playwhich has all the air of being a sort of yield of emotional accounts. Not a look back, but on the side. Out of the pub, on a blackboard, there is a quote from Old Phone: “Nostalgia tries to take me off the road.”
No more mathematical equations, no signs of multiplication, subtraction or division. Just a verb, a hymn: sound, crush play, go ahead. Sheeran gives him to see all the time, with serenity, joking with the public (“This, please sing it, do not do as those at the coachella”), looking for people's gaze as if he wanted to understand which friends he has in front of him. Not a frontman, but one who speaks to you and that in the end intones an chapel version of Parding Glass Smiling to a girl in the very first row that in religious silence does not stop whimpering in the mother's arms. There are smartphones raised, it's true, and there are many, a few centimeters from one of the most popular pop stars of the last twenty years. But there is no crowd, only the cackles of children, pensioners of the place intrigued by the thing, families in celebration. People who perhaps met shopping years ago.
It all ends without great ceremonies, without encore. Nathalie orders a beer and chat together with other fans known through her page, the ritual lasts between comments on the performance and laughter of those who are a second family for her. Ed Sheeran returned where it all started, but perhaps basically not for true nostalgia: for gratitude. To put some piece back to his place for his Eternal Sunshine of Gondryana memory. Or simply to remember – and remember – that sometimes music is only this: a small room, a pint with friends, an old phone to remind us who we were. Between folk and songwriting, to press Play and move forward.
